Just after 09:00 local time on 26 January, the Polish Border Guard’s primary passport-control database suffered an unexpected outage, paralysing all eight road and rail checkpoints along the Lviv and Volyn corridors. Officials on both sides of the frontier switched to manual passport stamping, but throughput fell from roughly 50 vehicles per hour to fewer than a dozen, generating kilometre-long queues within two hours.
The failure—reportedly linked to a corrupted server cluster at the Border Guard’s Warsaw data centre—affected the automatic upload of Entry/Exit System (EES) records to the EU’s central repository. While Polish and Ukrainian authorities stressed that no personal data were compromised, the incident once again highlighted the fragility of highly digitised border processes introduced ahead of the EU-wide EES go-live in October 2025.
![Database Outage Hits All Poland–Ukraine Border Crossings, Travellers Advised to Re-route]()
For travellers looking to minimise further uncertainty, VisaHQ’s online visa and passport services can streamline document checks before arrival. The platform’s dedicated Poland page (https://www.visahq.com/poland/) offers up-to-date entry regulations, e-visa options and real-time status tracking, helping both business and leisure passengers prepare the paperwork ahead of time and avoid additional waits at the border.
For companies running just-in-time supply chains between Polish manufacturing plants and Ukrainian suppliers, the timing could not have been worse. Automotive wiring harnesses, white-goods components and IT-services staff routinely cross the frontier daily; several tier-1 suppliers activated contingency plans to ship parts via the Slovakia–Ukraine corridor instead, adding at least six hours to transit times. International assignment managers were urged to postpone non-essential travel until full system functionality returns.
By late afternoon, engineers had restored partial service, but the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine warned that intermittent slow-downs could persist through the evening as backlogged EES transactions synchronise. Travellers were advised to carry printed accommodation bookings and proof of onward travel in case manual checks continue. The Polish Ministry of the Interior has ordered an urgent audit of data-centre fail-overs and pledged to publish a remediation plan within 72 hours.
The failure—reportedly linked to a corrupted server cluster at the Border Guard’s Warsaw data centre—affected the automatic upload of Entry/Exit System (EES) records to the EU’s central repository. While Polish and Ukrainian authorities stressed that no personal data were compromised, the incident once again highlighted the fragility of highly digitised border processes introduced ahead of the EU-wide EES go-live in October 2025.
For travellers looking to minimise further uncertainty, VisaHQ’s online visa and passport services can streamline document checks before arrival. The platform’s dedicated Poland page (https://www.visahq.com/poland/) offers up-to-date entry regulations, e-visa options and real-time status tracking, helping both business and leisure passengers prepare the paperwork ahead of time and avoid additional waits at the border.
For companies running just-in-time supply chains between Polish manufacturing plants and Ukrainian suppliers, the timing could not have been worse. Automotive wiring harnesses, white-goods components and IT-services staff routinely cross the frontier daily; several tier-1 suppliers activated contingency plans to ship parts via the Slovakia–Ukraine corridor instead, adding at least six hours to transit times. International assignment managers were urged to postpone non-essential travel until full system functionality returns.
By late afternoon, engineers had restored partial service, but the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine warned that intermittent slow-downs could persist through the evening as backlogged EES transactions synchronise. Travellers were advised to carry printed accommodation bookings and proof of onward travel in case manual checks continue. The Polish Ministry of the Interior has ordered an urgent audit of data-centre fail-overs and pledged to publish a remediation plan within 72 hours.
